I cover science and public policy, environmental sustainability, media ideology, NGO advocacy and corporate responsibility. I'm executive director of the Genetic Literacy Project (www.GeneticLiteracyProject.org), an independent NGO, and Senior Fellow at the World Food Center's Institute for Food and Agricultural Literacy at the University of California-Davis. I've edited/authored seven books on genetics, chemicals, risk assessment and sustainability, and my favorite, on why I never graduated from college football player (place kicker) to pro athlete: "Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We're Afraid to Talk About It". Previously, I was a producer and executive for 20 yeas at ABC News and NBC News. Motto: Follow the facts, not the ideology. Play hard. Love dogs.

The latest ‘greatest danger to ever face humanity’ emerged with the publication last month of an obscure, technical study in GM Crops & Foods, a prominent biotech journal. The article, ungainly titled “Possible consequences of the overlap between the CaMV 35S promoter regions in plant transformation vectors used and the viral gene VI in transgenic plants,” by scientists Nancy Podevin and Patrick du Jardin, has set off a feeding frenzy among the scientifically unwashed.

“[T]he European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) [charged with overseeing GM crops throughout the European Union] has belatedly discovered that the most common genetic regulatory sequence in commercial GMOs also encodes a significant fragment of a viral gene,” wrote the ISN reporters. The journalists claimed—erroneously—that the “discovery” could pose a serious hazard to human health.

Within hours of its posting on the ISN site, the article was replicated or reported upon by almost every oddball anti-GMO organization and website, led by the notoriously anti-science OCA and the IRT. Headlines like “Could Viral DNA Spawn a Massive GMO Food Recall” sprouted like weeds on sites like Activist Post.

Enquiring readers want to know. I’ll make it easy for them and the chattering classes: “No.”

Déjà vu all over again

This ‘sky is falling’ claim is a familiar trope among anti-science “progressive” organizations and websites. But the tactic appears to be wearing thin with both the public and increasingly with mainstream journalists who only recently have begun challenging the junk journalism that still prevails in reporting about GM crops, foods and animals, and genetic research in general, including in humans.

It’s been a tough few months for the anti-technology hysteriacs. First came Le Affair Séralini in which a brazenly anti-technology French scientist appears to have cooked the research books to propagandize that GM soy products were likely to twist human guts into a cancer-wrenched pretzel. Scientists savaged the study and even anti-GMO academicians distanced themselves from its blatantly poor level of scholarship. Many journalists who had stood on the sidelines as anti-GMO fanatics, fashioning themselves as progressives, propagandized on the issue finally said ‘enough is enough’. Suddenly, biotech activists started to look a lot like the Democrat’s version of global warning deniers.

The Séralini fiasco helped erode the wide but soft support for California Proposition 37, which would have imposed labeling of GMOs—a step the National Academy of Sciences, the American Medical Association and most respectable science organizations opposed as deceptive and counterproductive, as GMOs is a process that poses no known dangers to humans.

The year ended particularly badly for activists when the White House reversed its political opposition to approving the first animal genetically modified for human consumption, a GM slamon that scientists at the Food and Drug Administration had determined was perfectly safe and nutritious. The White House’s turnaround came after a well-publicized investigative article by the Genetic Literacy Project in Slate, and later picked up by scientists and journalists around the world.

Mark Lynas, a British journalist and longtime anti-GMO campaigner who is credited (or blamed, depending upon your perspective) by some with coining the word Frankenfood, delivered a public and articulate denouncement of himself—or rather his former belief that GM crops and foods were a public health and environmental scourge.

“This was … an explicitly anti-science movement,” Lynas told a stunned audience at the annual Oxford Farming Conference, of his past fellow travelers. “I …assisted in demonizing an important technological option which can be used to benefit the environment.”

These series of events have stunned anti-GMO activists. Perhaps, it’s little surprise that the “anti forces” are trying to regroup, attempting to re-corral the anti-technology herd.

The only virus on the loose is the ‘truth virus’

Activists are propagating a stark and scary. “The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), the EU regulatory agency that provides advice on the health and safety of foods, has unwittingly discovered that a majority of the genetic material used in the GMO foods that we see on supermarket shelves today contains the large portion of a viral gene, called simply “Gene VI,’ wrote activist-journalist Marsea Truan earlier this week in Rosebud in an article making the rounds at progressive sites. “Gene VI is arguably unsafe for human consumption and even more unsafe for the ecosystem.”

Literally nothing in that statement is accurate. One of the viral gene journal authors, Nancy Podevin, works for the EFSA. But she didn’t “unwittingly” discover anything as the anti-GMO conspiracy theorists are suggesting. Any journalist remotely familiar with GM research would know that the use of the CaMV promoter in genetic modification has been standard practice since the 1980s. There is no news here.

“Contrary to recent claims, the data published in the paper by Podevin and du Jardin do not represent a new discovery of a viral gene nor do they indicate safety concerns in previously evaluated GMOs,” noted Professor Joe Perry, Chair of the EFSA GMO Panel. who oversees Podevin’s work.

Certainly, the Organic Consumers Association, which has featured and promoted the scare story going on three weeks, knew that this story is both old news and has no teeth. The faux controversy echoes a similar brouhaha that erupted in 1999 after the publication of a paper co-authored by Joe Cummins. Cauliflower Mosaic Viral Promoter – A Recipe for Disaster? promoted the Cummins thesis that a plant gene virus could somehow harm humans. That claim—roughly akin to saying you shouldn’t sneeze around your favorite plant because it might catch your cold—was widely disseminated via a web post by one of his co-authors, Mae-Won Ho.

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You know that I’ve never eaten a GM strawberry, do you Jon? I think it worth noting that what you advertise is what other people tell you, off their pulpit of peer-review, and what I advertise is what I experience. As if “science” is evolved to tell even a fragment of the whole story of nutrition, of what we “eat”, and how this relates to how we function. There is a great deal we don’t know and cannot (using today’s methods anyway) measure…or do you believe we know all there is to know of the scientific method, and that it tells the whole story of GM? Are you that naive and presumptuous? “GM is safe”, is this what one of your “scientists” has told you? Real science is evolved, but it is lost, it is not published and not practiced – “science” on the other hand is research bent by special interest…as we see everywhere around us today. I work in labs, and I see scientists tinkering away on things they have no grasp of, so how can their findings relate to anything other than what a superior wants them to relate to? Simply put, the forest is lost for the trees. I prefer to rely on pure discovery science, run from experiments on foods and the effects they have on my body. It is a very reliable method, doesn’t require the usual cooked-up hypothesis driven from some ambitious mind operating at less that sane reasoning. Discovery relies on no “dogma” including dogma of empiricism. Or does empiricism tell the whole story, Jon? The observable world is useful – but to repeat – it doesn’t tell the whole story so neither can empirical “science”, owing to its reliance on today’s limited measuring methods and equipment. You seem to assume all that is possibly knowable can be measured and is being measured and is known, today. It is not, but your view will not be challenged by industry who have devised their own very interesting methods for “proving things out”. There are “energetic” differences (I know you hate that word) calculable and real between conventional and organic. You won’t find a device made by any industrialist which can measure it however. I wish I could tell you my reporting of this simple fact is voodoo…really, I would love to discover I am in a fantasy world and that GM and recombinant technology applied to food and to the building of new species generally is the boon to mankind that you make it out to be. But I’m not sure it is me who lives in a fantasy…certainly I do not suffer the fantasy of building my world view and subsequently my writings around other what people say.

You wrote: “You seem to assume all that is possibly knowable can be measured and is being measured and is known, today.” That’s your assumption, not mine. That said, I would hope that our science. agricultural and nutrition policies are evidence-based instead of Creationist-based. But the anti-GM movement conflates myths, scares and projections into an anti-science cocktail. Advice: Please make sure you avoid those toxic, killer GM stawberries that the Franken-mad scientists in Corporate-land have been growing behind your back while using the world population as guinea pigs.

I think that’s probably a bit of a stretch, Jon. But I get what you’re saying, “sit back and relax everyone and let biotech and their “scientists” handle what goes into your food and what you begin to consider to be food”. So now men are building food (starting by tinkering with the genome) with mother nature in a kind of partnership role. The idea is at least to me a violation of any measure of sane reasoning, but to most feed-eaters it won’t matter, their mental equipment literally starved and atrophied, and this thanks in large part to nutritional components NOT getting into their food (a much bigger story and health impact than anything getting into them – which is the erroneous focus of the discussion). So “science” is leading the debate – a cooked-up fool’s debate. Much damage is being done in the process meanwhile industry gets a free pass.

You get what YOU ARE saying and making up what I’m saying. What you don’t realize is that almost all of the food you eat today has been engineered. For example the bread and pasta and cakes you eat? It’s from genetically modified wheat–the varietals that we have today were modified. Many foods have been “created”–altering Nature’s intent, using your religious prism. Many fruits and vegetables have been “created” though random radiation, something that your ilk–the anti-science/anti-GMO faction–apparently feels is just fine, thank you. As for those who are science-minded rather than religous/ideology minded…we’d rather gene modifications that are beneficial to humans be done more precisely in a laboratory. How HORRIBLE it would be, in your world view, if the developing world had access to drought and saline and heat resistant grain varietals. OMG! We might save lives. Forgive me, but I find your ultra-right wing perspective anti-human and repulsive.

Yes, I’m definitely GMO-sceptical if not decidedly anti-GMO in action, at least in the produce section, and based on the evidence gathered over multiple home-based experiments (“anti-GMO” not to be confused for some personal ideology around which to draw conclusions about i.e. to end awareness about. Do you understand the difference, Jon?). If what I have scientifically discovered makes me the target of your scorn and derision, who is the ideologue? I wish we were discussing what we each actually know as based on each our own experiments (rather than me telling you what I’ve discovered followed by you refuting me based on what you’ve read second-hand. How arrogant.). It doesn’t sound to me like you’ve ever even considered testing foods to see how you respond to them. I have, ad this makes me a scientist not an ideologue. If you had actually practiced the science you preach you could speak from a place of actual experience and you would have something useful to contribute, adding in some small but significant way to the overall understanding of GM. Your words would then ring true as based on your experience which is irrefutable. And since you bring it up, other cultures are probably trying to come to grips with genetic modification in their own way and based on their own truth, but how this relates to what goes onto my table I can’t say. Unlike you I don’t pretend to know what is good for other people including as relates to their agriculture practices. At risk of being “anti-human” I wonder how people in India feel about how much you claim to know about what is going to save them? As you mention and in this country at least we are losing control over what goes into our bodies, owing to the ubiquitous influence of GM. Scientists are “crafting” what goes into grocery products and into many farm products (when you consider engineering is from the genome-up, “crafting” probably a fair if not overly kind way to put it). In this country scientists, like it or not, are increasingly linked to industry (knowingly or not) and therefore what is profitable to industry is what will be increasingly crafted into human feed. Who among scientists knows the full implication of the impact of emergent and highly ubiquitous recombinant DNA technology? Who knew the full implication of nuclear energy or air flight 100 years ago? Despite the considerable genius at work (then and now) if I had refused to trust the Wright brothers with flying me from New York to Boston would that have also qualified me as a repulsive-right-wing-anti-human-creationist?

It’s strange to me how GM is crowding out non-GM in grocery stores and is invading or contaminating non-GM in the fields with GM varieties (not to be confused with plant or animal husbandry) yet we are to trust the science establishment to provide us with the whole truth even this early in the game (if it weren’t so my observations would not be the target of your insults). But it remains that those with an “impulse to conscience” not yet fully atrophied by improper nutrition will find such blind trust to scientific assumption a violation to any measure of sane reasoning. A healthy scientific-minded grounding in “skepticism” leads one to believe only that which can be verify in experience; but instead, I am made out here to be the enemy (I use that word deliberately just check out the tone of the responses I’ve received). But not just me, Jon. You take aim here at persons of all walks of life who base their everyday evidence-based decisions on “home based experiments”. Needless to say there is not an athlete alive who does not base liquid intake on information provided up by the bodies reporting mechanisms, just as many parents base food decisions by how different food choices affect the child. I can’t believe I am stepping this down to a here-and-now early childhood understanding of what constitutes good science, but as I bump up against the obvious limitations in your understanding of the way things are I find it sadly necessary. Nothing interesting or fruitful or insightful in the least has come out of your article or for that matter out of sharing with you my legitimate “home based” observations. (It has been interesting to note; however, how quickly others reach for sticks and stones when pushed up against the limits of their own understanding. This is of course entirely expected where interest in gaining new understanding takes a back seat to interest in “being right” and which incidentally usually (always) leads to those typical, desperate and usually violent efforts to confirm prejudices or to save face).

My own evidence is 100% empirical, meaning it is “based on, concerned with, or verifiable by observation or experience”. Your “evidence” is 100% second-hand. My experiments have been run on different foods, GM and non GM, and over many years. You apparently don’t run experiments. “Serious people” are not required for my findings to reflect reality. You connect being approved by “serious people” as a scientific prerequisite (“serious people” usually locked in institutions working not to encourage skepticism but working to ensure the health of the institution). You have the temerity to tell me what I discover has no validity because your peer-reviewing serious ones aren’t privy to my findings? Fact is if you knew what I’ve discovered about food, food choices and health as relates to GM, all verifiable and all empirical, you’d refrain from name-calling. “Crank” of course a term of highest insult for any “serious” scientist, and “serious” by definition “grave or earnest”…nowhere implying “describing those with an ability to capture the truth of the matter”. I don’t think I will defer to your serious types. I am anything but convinced that they understand truth any better than you do, who I am fully convinced understands only his own made-up patched-together “truth” which (at best) allows you to take wild swings in the general direction of where you think truth might best line up with your need for approval.

No one can be 100% sure that food with GMOs are safe. We know that some substances may take decades for the harm they promote to become evident. Science has made mistakes in the past and probably still does. Cigarette smoking was considered safe for quite a while backed by science. DDT was almost considered a blessing. Anyways, if GMOs are really that great, why companies spend millions to avoid the GMO labeliing? They should be doing whatever they can to inform that their products carry GMOs with TV ads and nicely designed labels making sure for the consumers that they are getting the so safe(???) GMOs. And why Austria, France, Greece, Hungary, Germany and Luxembourg can apply a “safeguard clause” on GMO events? Are scientists in these countries less informed or in fact more informed?